We have written this privacy policy (version 09.06.2021-111756553) to provide you with information in accordance with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 as well as to explain what information we collect, how we use data and what choices you have as a visitor to this website.
Privacy policies usually sound very technical. However, this version should describe the most important things as simply and clearly as possible. Moreover, technical terms are explained in a reader-friendly manner whenever possible. We would also like to convey that we only collect and use information via this website if there is a corresponding legal basis for it. This is certainly not possible if you give very brief technical explanations, as are often standard on the Internet when it comes to data protection. We hope you find the following explanations interesting and informative. Maybe you will also find some information that you did not know yet.
Should you still have questions, we kindly ask you to follow the existing links to see further information on third-party websites, or to simply write us an email. You can find our contact information in our website’s imprint.
Rights in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation
You are granted the following rights in accordance with the provisions of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the Austrian Data Protection Act (DSG):
- right to rectification (article 16 GDPR)
- right to erasure (“right to be forgotten“) (article 17 GDPR)
- right to restrict processing (article 18 GDPR)
- righ to notification – notification obligation regarding rectification or erasure of personal data or restriction of processing (article 19 GDPR)
- right to data portability (article 20 GDPR)
- Right to object (article 21 GDPR)
- right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing – including profiling – (article 22 GDPR)
If you think that the processing of your data violates the data protection law, or that your data protection rights have been infringed in any other way, you can lodge a complaint with your respective regulatory authority. For Austria this is the data protection authority, whose website you can access at https://www.data-protection-authority.gv.at/.
TLS encryption with https
The terms TLS, encryption and https sound very technical, which they are indeed. We use HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) to securely transfer data on the Internet.
This means that the entire transmission of all data from your browser to our web server is secured – nobody can “listen in”.
We have thus introduced an additional layer of security and meet privacy requirements through technology design Article 25 Section 1 GDPR). With the use of TLS (Transport Layer Security), which is an encryption protocol for safe data transfer on the internet, we can ensure the protection of confidential information.
You can recognise the use of this safeguarding tool by the little lock-symbol 
, which is situated in your browser’s top left corner in the left of the internet address (e.g. examplepage.uk), as well as by the display of the letters https (instead of http) as a part of our web address.
If you want to know more about encryption, we recommend you to do a Google search for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure wiki” to find good links to further information.
Automatic Data Retention
Every time you visit a website nowadays, certain information is automatically created and stored, just as it happens on this website. This data should be collected as sparingly as possible, and only with good reason. By website, we mean the entirety of all websites on your domain, i.e. everything from the homepage to the very last subpage (like this one here). By domain we mean example.uk or examplepage.com.
Even while you are currently visiting our website, our web server – this is the computer this website is stored on, usually automatically retains data such as the below – for reasons such as operational security or for creating access statistics etc.
- the full address (URL) of the accessed website (e. g. https://www.examplepage.uk/examplesubpage.html/)
- browser and browser version (e.g. Chrome 87)
- the operating system used (e.g. Windows 10)
- the address (URL) of the previously visited site (referrer URL) (z. B. https://www.examplepage.uk/icamefromhere.html/)
- the host name and the IP-address of the device the website is accessed from (e.g. COMPUTERNAME and 194.23.43.121)
- date and time
- in so-called web server log files.
As an illustration:
Generally, these files are stored for two weeks and are then automatically deleted. We do not pass these data to others, but we cannot exclude the possibility that this data may be looked at by the authorities in case of illegal conduct.
In short: your visit is logged by our provider (company that runs our website on servers), but we do not pass on your data!
Cookies
Our website uses HTTP-cookies to store user-specific data.
For your better understanding of the following Privacy Policy statement, we will explain to you below what cookies are and why they are in use.
What exactly are cookies?
Every time you surf the internet, you use a browser. Common browsers are for example Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge. Most websites store small text-files in your browser. These files are called cookies.
What should not be dismissed, is that cookies are very useful little helpers. Nearly all websites use cookies. More accurately speaking these are HTTP-cookies, since there are also different cookies for other uses. http-cookies are small files which our website stores on your computer. These cookie files are automatically put into the cookie-folder, which is like the “brain” of your browser. A cookie consists of a name and a value. Moreover, to define a cookie, one or multiple attributes must be specified.
Cookies save certain parts of your user data, such as e.g. language or personal page settings. When you re-open our website, your browser submits these “user specific” information back to our site. Thanks to cookies, our website knows who you are and offers you the settings you are familiar to. In some browsers every cookie has its own file, in others such as Firefox, all cookies are stored in one single file.
There are both first-party cookies and third-party cookies. First-party cookies are created directly by our site, while third-party cookies are created by partner-websites (e.g. Google Analytics). Every cookie is individual, since every cookie stores different data. The expiration time of a cookie also varies – it can be a few minutes, or up to a few years. Cookies are no software-programs and contain no computer viruses, trojans or any other malware. Cookies also cannot access your PC’s information.
This is an example of how cookie-files can look:
name: _ga
value: GA1.2.1326744211.152111756553-9
purpose: differentiation between website visitors
expiration date: after 2 years
A browser should support these minimum sizes:
- at least 4096 bytes per cookie
- at least 50 cookies per domain
- at least 3000 cookies in total
Which types of cookies are there?
What exact cookies we use, depends on the used services. We will explain this in the following sections of the Privacy Policy statement. Firstly, we will briefly focus on the different types of HTTP-cookies.
There are 4 different types of cookies:
Essential Cookies
These cookies are necessary to ensure the basic function of a website. They are needed when a user for example puts a product into their shopping cart, then continues surfing on different websites and comes back later in order to proceed to the checkout. Even when the user closed their window priorly, these cookies ensure that the shopping cart does not get deleted.
Purposive Cookies
These cookies collect info about the user behaviour and record if the user potentially receives any error messages. Furthermore, these cookies record the website’s loading time as well as its behaviour within different browsers.
Target-orientated Cookies
These cookies care for an improved user-friendliness. Thus, information such as previously entered locations, fonts or data in forms stay saved.
Advertising Cookies
These cookies are also known as targeting-Cookies. They serve the purpose of delivering individually adapted advertisements to the user. This can be very practical, but also rather annoying.
Upon your first visit to a website you are usually asked which of these cookie-types you want to accept. Furthermore, this decision will of course also be saved in a cookie.
How can I delete cookies?
You yourself take the decision if and how you want to use cookies. Thus, no matter what service or website cookies are from, you always have the option to delete, deactivate or only partially allow them. Therefore, you can for example block cookies of third parties but allow any other cookies.
If you want change or delete cookie-settings and would like to determine which cookies have been saved to your browser, you can find this info in your browser-settings:
Chrome: Clear, enable and manage cookies in Chrome
Safari: Manage cookies and website data in Safari
Firefox: Clear cookies and site data in Firefox
Internet Explorer: Delete and manage cookies
Microsoft Edge: Delete cookies in Microsoft Edge
If you generally do not want to allow any cookies at all, you can set up your browser in a way, to notify you whenever a potential cookie is about to be set. This gives you the opportunity to manually decide to either permit or deny the placement of every single cookie. The settings for this differ from browser to browser. Therefore, it might be best for you to search for the instructions in Google. If you are using Chrome, you could for example put the search phrase “delete cookies Chrome” or “deactivate cookies Chrome” into Google.
How is my data protected?
There is a “cookie policy” that has been in place since 2009. It states that the storage of cookies requires the user’s consent. However, among the countries of the EU, these guidelines are often met with mixed reactions. In Austria the guidelines have been implemented in § 96 section 3 of the Telecommunications Act (TKG).
If you want to learn more about cookies and do not mind technical documentation, we recommend https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6265, the Request for Comments of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) called “HTTP State Management Mechanism”.
Google Analytics Privacy Policy
We use the tracking and analysis tool Google Analytics (GA) of the US-American company Google LLC (1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043, USA). Google Analytics collects data on your actions on our website. Whenever you click a link for example, this action is saved in a cookie and transferred to Google Analytics. With the help of reports which we receive from Google Analytics, we can adapt our website and our services better to your wishes. In the following, we will explain the tracking tool in more detail, and most of all, we will inform you what data is saved and how you can prevent this.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a tracking tool with the purpose of conducting data traffic analysis of our website. For Google Analytics to work, there is a tracking code integrated to our website. Upon your visit to our website, this code records various actions you perform on your website. As soon as you leave our website, this data is sent to the Google Analytics server, where it is stored.
Google processes this data and we then receive reports on your user behaviour. These reports can be one of the following:
- Target audience reports: With the help of target audience reports we can get to know our users better and can therefore better understand who is interested in our service.
- Advertising reports: Through advertising reports we can analyse our online advertising better and hence improve it.
- Acquisition reports: Acquisition reports provide us helpful information on how we can get more people enthusiastic about our service.
- Behaviour reports: With these reports, we can find out how you interact with our website. By the means of behaviour reports, we can understand what path you go on our website and what links you click.
- Conversion reports: A conversion is the process of leading you to carry out a desired action due to a marketing message. An example of this would be transforming you from a mere website visitor into a buyer or a newsletter subscriber. Hence, with the help of these reports we can see in more detail, if our marketing measures are successful with you. Our aim is to increase our conversion rate.
- Real time reports: With the help of these reports we can see in real time, what happens on our website. It makes us for example see, we can see how many users are reading this text right now.
Why do we use Google Analytics on our website?
The objective of our website is clear: We want to offer you the best possible service. Google Analytics’ statistics and data help us with reaching this goal.
Statistically evaluated data give us a clear picture of the strengths and weaknesses of our website. On the one hand, we can optimise our page in a way, that makes it easier to be found by interested people on Google. On the other hand, the data helps us to get a better understanding of you as our visitor. Therefore, we can very accurately find out what we must improve on our website, in order to offer you the best possible service. The analysis of that data also enables us to carry out our advertising and marketing measures in a more individual and more cost-effective way. After all, it only makes sense to show our products and services exclusively to people who are interested in them.
What data gets stored by Google Analytics?
With the aid of a tracking code, Google Analytics creates a random, unique ID which is connected to your browser cookie. That way, Google Analytics recognises you as a new user. The next time you visit our site, you will be recognised as a “recurring” user. All data that is collected gets saved together with this very user ID. Only this is how it is made possible for us to evaluate and analyse pseudonymous user profiles.
Your interactions on our website are measures by tags such as cookies and app instance IDs. Interactions are all kinds of actions that you perform on our website. If you are also using other Google systems (such as a Google Account), data generated by Google Analytics can be linked with third-party cookies. Google does not pass on any Google Analytics data, unless we as the website owners authorise it. In case it is required by law, exceptions can occur.
The following cookies are used by Google Analytics:
Name: _ga
Value:2.1326744211.152111756553-5
Purpose: By deafault, analytics.js uses the cookie _ga, to save the user ID. It generally serves the purpose of differenciating between website visitors.
Expiration date: After 2 years
Name: _gid
Value:2.1687193234.152111756553-1
Purpose: This cookie also serves the purpose of differentiating between website users
Expiration date: After 24 hours
Name: _gat_gtag_UA_<property-id>
Value: 1
Verwendungszweck: It is used for decreasing the demand rate. If Google Analytics is provided via Google Tag Manager, this cookie gets the name _dc_gtm_ <property-id>.
Expiration date: After 1 minute
Name: AMP_TOKEN
Value: No information
Purpose: This cookie has a token which is used to retrieve the user ID by the AMP Client ID Service. Other possible values suggest a logoff, a request or an error.
Expiration date: After 30 seconds up to one year
Name: __utma
Value:1564498958.1564498958.1564498958.1
Purpose: With this cookie your behaviour on the website can be tracked and the site performance can be measured. The cookie is updated every time the information is sent to Google Analytics.
Expiration date: After 2 years
Name: __utmt
Value: 1
Purpose: Just like _gat_gtag_UA_<property-id> this cookie is used for keeping the requirement rate in check.
Expiration date: Afer 10 minutes
Name: __utmb
Value:3.10.1564498958
Purpose: This cookie is used to determine new sessions. It is updated every time new data or information gets sent to Google Analytics.
Expiration date: After 30 minutes
Name: __utmc
Value: 167421564
Purpose: This cookie is used to determine new sessions for recurring visitors. It is therefore a session cookie, and only stays saved until you close the browser again.
Expiration date: After closing the browser
Name: __utmz
Value: m|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/
Purpose: This cookie is used to identify the source of our website’s visitor number. This means, that the cookie saves information on where you came to our website from. This could be another site or an advertisement.
Expiration date: After 6 months
Name: __utmv
Value: No information
Purpose: The cookie is used to store custom user data. It gets updated whenever information is sent to Google Analytics.
Expiration date: After 2 years
Note: This list is by no means exhaustive, since Google are repeatedly changing the use of their cookies.
Below we will give you an overview of the most important data that can be evaluated by Google Analytics:
Heatmaps: Google creates so-called Heatmaps an. These Heatmaps make it possible to see the exact areas you click on, so we can get information on what routes you make on our website.
Session duration: Google calls the time you spend on our website without leaving it session duration. Whenever you are inactive for 20 minutes, the session ends automatically.
Bounce rate If you only look at one page of our website and then leave our website again, it is called a bounce.
Account creation: If you create an account or make an order on our website, Google Analytics collects this data.
IP-Address: The IP address is only shown in a shortened form, to make it impossible to clearly allocate it.
Location: Your approximate location and the country you are in can be defined by the IP address. This process is called IP location determination.
Technical information: Information about your browser type, your internet provider and your screen resolution are called technical information.
Source: Both, Google Analytics as well as ourselves, are interested what website or what advertisement led you to our site.
Further possibly stored data includes contact data, potential reviews, playing media (e.g. when you play a video on our site), sharing of contents via social media or adding our site to your favourites. This list is not exhaustive and only serves as general guidance on Google Analytics’ data retention.
How long and where is the data saved?
Google has servers across the globe. Most of them are in America and therefore your data is mainly saved on American servers. Here you can read detailed information on where Google’s data centres are located: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/?hl=en
Your data is allocated to various physical data mediums. This has the advantage of allowing to retrieve the data faster, and of protecting it better from manipulation. Every Google data centre has respective emergency programs for your data. Hence, in case of a hardware failure at Google or a server error due to natural disasters, the risk for a service interruption stays relatively low.
Google Analytics has a 26 months standardised period of retaining your user data. After this time, your user data is deleted. However, we have the possibility to choose the retention period of user data ourselves. There are the following five options:
- Deletion after 14 months
- Deletion after 26 months
- Deletion after 38 months
- Deletion after 50 months
- No automatical deletion
As soon as the chosen period is expired, the data is deleted once a month. This retention period applies to any of your data which is linked to cookies, user identification and advertisement IDs (e.g. cookies of the DoubleClick domain). Any report results are based on aggregated information and are stored independently of any user data. Aggregated information is a merge of individual data into a single and bigger unit.
How can I delete my data or prevent data retention?
Under the provisions of the European Union’s data protection law, you have the right to obtain information on your data and to update, delete or restrict it. With the help of a browser add on that can deactivate Google Analytics’ JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, dc.js), you can prevent Google Analytics from using your data. You can download this add on at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en-GB. Please consider that this add on can only deactivate any data collection by Google Analytics.
Should you generally want to deactivate, delete or manage all cookies (independently of Google Analytics), you can use one of the guides that are available for any browser:
Chrome: Clear, enable and manage cookies in Chrome
Safari: Manage cookies and website data in Safari
Firefox: Clear cookies and site data in Firefox
Internet Explorer: Delete and manage cookies
Microsoft Edge: Delete cookies in Microsoft Edge
Google Analytics is an active participant of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework, which regulates correct and save transfer of personal data.
You can find more information on this at https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt000000001L5AAI&tid=111756553. We hope we were able to make you more familiar with the most important information on Google Analytics’ data processing. If you want to learn more about the tracking service, we recommend both of the following links: https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/terms/gb/ and https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245?hl=en.
Google Analytics IP Anonymisation
We implemented Google Analytics’ IP address anonymisation to this website. Google developed this function, so this website can comply with the applicable privacy laws and the local data protection authorities’ recommendations, should they prohibit the retention of any full IP addresses.
The anonymisation or masking of IP addresses takes place, as soon as they reach Google Analytics’ data collection network, but before the data would be saved or processed.
You can find more information on IP anonymisation at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en.
Google Tag Manager Privacy Policy
We use Google Tag Manager by the company Google Inc. (1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043, USA) for our website.
This Tag Manager is one of Google’s many helpful marketing products. With it, we can centrally integrate and manage code sections of various tracking tools, that we use on our website.
In this privacy statement we will explain in more detail, what Google Tag Manager does, why we use it and to what extent your data is processed.
What is Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager is an organising tool with which we can integrate and manage website tags centrally and via a user interface. Tags are little code sections which e.g. track your activities on our website. For this, segments of JavaScript code are integrated to our site’s source text. The tags often come from Google’s intern products, such as Google Ads or Google Analytics, but tags from other companies can also be integrated and managed via the manager. Since the tags have different tasks, they can collect browser data, feed marketing tools with data, embed buttons, set cookies and track users across several websites.
Why do we use Google Tag Manager for our website?
Everybody knows: Being organised is important! Of course, this also applies to maintenance of our website. In order to organise and design our website as well as possible for you and anyone who is interested in our products and services, we rely on various tracking tools, such as Google Analytics.
The collected data shows us what interests you most, which of our services we should improve, and which other persons we should also display our services to. Furthermore, for this tracking to work, we must implement relevant JavaScript Codes to our website. While we could theoretically integrate every code section of every tracking tool separately into our source text, this would take too much time and we would lose overview. This is the reason why we use Google Tag Manager. We can easily integrate the necessary scripts and manage them from one place. Additionally, Google Tag Manager’s user interface is easy to operate, and requires no programming skills. Therefore, we can easily keep order in our jungle of tags.
What data is saved by Google Tag Manager?
Tag Manager itself is a domain that neither uses cookies nor stores data. It merely functions as an “administrator“ of implemented tags. Data is collected by the individual tags of the different web analysis tools. Therefore, in Google Tag Manager the data is sent to the individual tracking tools and does not get saved.
However, with the integrated tags of different web analysis tools such as Google Analytics, this is quite different. Depending on the analysis tool used, various data on your internet behaviour is collected, stored and processed with the help of cookies. Please read our texts on data protection for more information on the articular analysis and tracking tools we use on our website.
We allowed Google via the account settings for the Tag Manager to receive anonymised data from us. However, this exclusively refers to the use of our Tag Manager and not to your data, which are saved via code sections. We allow Google and others, to receive selected data in anonymous form. Therefore, we agree to the anonymised transfer of our website data. However, even after extensive research we could not find out what summarised and anonymous data it is exactly that gets transmitted. What we do know is that Google deleted any info that could identify our website. Google combines the data with hundreds of other anonymous website data and creates user trends as part of benchmarking measures. Benchmarking is a process of comparing a company’s results with the ones of competitors. As a result, processes can be optimised based on the collected information.
How long and where is the data saved?
When Google stores data, this is done on Google’s own servers. These servers are located all over the world, with most of them being in America. At https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/?hl=en you can read in detail where Google’s servers are.
In our individual data protection texts on the different tools you can find out how long the respective tracking tools save your data.
How can I delete my data or prevent data retention?
Google Tag Manager itself does not set any cookies but manages different tracking websites’ tags. In our data protection texts on the different tracking tools you can find detailed information on how you can delete or manage your data.
Google actively participates in the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework, which regulates safe transfer of personal data. You can find more information at https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt000000001L5AAI&tid=111756553. If you want to learn more about Google Tag Manager, we recommend you to read https://marketingplatform.google.com/intl/en_uk/about/tag-manager/.
All texts are copyrighted.Source: Created with the Datenschutz Generator by AdSimple